Turns out Khayyam was Omar's takhallus (poetic name) and actually means Tentmaker.I don't know how much a potential son o' mine would like being called a Tentmaker.The lens a translator wears is as tranformative for poetry as the faith or faithlessness of a person reading a divine text. I found Satanic Verses silly, Rushdie seemed to have problems of faith that I did when I was 14. (Not to detract from his writing, his Midnight's Children is one of the most transporting books I have read). Fitzgerald viewed Khayyam's metophoric obsession- wine- as something exactly that, metaphoric, while a couple of other translations I found (not so much Avery & Stubbs) make it just about the wine. Fitzgerald feels "Having failed (however mistakenly) of finding any Providence but Destiny, and any World but This, he set about making the most of it; preferring rather to soothe the Soul through the Senses into Acquiescence with Things as he saw them, than to perplex it with vain
disquietude after what they might be." That still happens, I think Maslow's pyramid builds on this sort of stuff, the drive to get to the next level is to ameliorate the fact that you may never find the final level.This is the verse I liked best from Fitzgerald
Here with a Loaf of Bread beneath the Bough,
A Flask of Wine, a Book of Verse--and Thou
Beside me singing in the Wilderness--
And Wilderness is Paradise enow.
I wonder if Khayyam had any sex appeal.
That is a momentary heaven but when small browm arms warm your neck and a giggling breath tickles your chin, I can think yes this is enough, this is where wanting stops.
A Plath that I was particularly taken by in the silence that follows the sudden withdrawal of electricity in Karachi (thank God for lappytoppys and all the literary gems stored on mine)It echoed.
Black lake, black boat, two black, cut-paper people.
Where do the black trees go that drink here?
Their shadows must cover Canada.
A little light is filtering from the water flowers.
Their leaves do not wish us to hurry:
They are round and flat and full of dark advice.
Cold worlds shake from the oar.
The spirit of blackness is in us, it is in the fishes.
A snag is lifting a valedictory, pale hand;
Stars open among the lilies.
Are you not blinded by such expressionless sirens?
This is the silence of astounded souls.
Discovery was showcasing a series on Mistresses and I only managed to catch the last half of it. It went back to the Shelleys (Mary Shelley was mistress to Percy before she married him and once a wife, the spark in her writing went, according to the show she never wrote an epic like Frankenstein again) and then Plath and Ted Hughes and how Plath's mistress and then later semi-wife(because they felt if a person had taken her life over their affair some solemnity should be attached to it)gassed herself with Hughes four year old daughter.And it was never paid as much attention.They also went on to discuss Lennon's mistress but I forget her name. I don't know if it is a particularly Pakistani trait but I don't have much faith in platonic relationships, there is always this necessary phase where the whole opposite sex thing has to be fleshed out and gotten over with. And it is difficult to have a platonic best friend and not to feel like his mistress sometimes. Or his mother.That was said tongue in cheek. (Late insertion here, just found this piece on Guardian on Ted Hughes infidelity pattern)
As ever, I want to say a lot more on this but I get tired of reading long blog posts so I'm going to let this germinate its own thoughts.
42 comments:
i thought you knew about the tentmaker thing...hahahaha khokli prat! haw hai ;)
i need a play to direct. funny and intelligent and not usual tthain tthain oscar wilde or beckett because nobody'll get that. think, wench.
Have never aimed to be a prat, Munchie's forte not mine. It's not even a tentmaker is some metaphorical or inherited style. Apparently he actually manufactured tents at some impoverished part of his life, most disturbing.
I thought you had decided on a play already ages ago?
Marlowe...not that its much of my business :p
*scratches chin*
Can eighth graders do Marlowe?Why can't they write a play and do it? We did that in seventh and ninth grade.
Ahhhhh...8th graders. Teaches me not interrupt...
am teaching eighth grade; the play is the a-level annual play...has to be the right blend of entertaining [for the teenybopper hoi polloi] and intelligent [for me]. sigh.
haan, he did make tents. calloused hands and soul of a poet. most romanchuk.
How did I become anonymous?
Mina: Don't like calloused hands, sound awfully contagious.
Stephen: My blog is occult.
hey thanks for dropping by my blog...i'm equally impressed by yours! :)
khayyam sounds so much better than tentmaker...isnt wonderful language and its sounds.
in the verse that you have quoted, i'd like the idea of wine for wine...hmmmm....perhaps its not correct to say that.
agree with u about the platonic relationship bit but one has to keep one's mind open to it. :)
Don't you feel rushdie was being just as "fanatical" in refusing to apologize (or at the very least acknowledge) for deliberately being disrespectful and completely insensitive to the muslim faith?
I would tend to agree with that, Rushdie was a Danish cartoon himself. While the reaction to his book was definitively overblown, his own handling of the situation reminded me of a number of female applicants to Ivy Leagues back in A Levels trying to capitalize on the we are oppressed/lesbian (again overblown accounts) women in Pakistan and need escape to your university. I'm not saying the cause is not genuine, but to be so blatantly opportunist just makes me a bit sick. Though I will admit there is nothing RATIONALLY:P wrong with manipulating a process to get to your ends.
Why should someone apologise for being deliberately disrespctful to another person's belief systems and values? Perhaps Person A thinks those beliefs are rubbish and should be disrespected?
Certainly it might be ill mannered. But then a world in which debate and discourse were constrainned by the requirement of politeness would be rather stagnant and dull.
Nothing wrong with it. I can disrespect your beliefs and values as much as I want in private.Ridiculing them in public doesn't open up space for a debate, it opens the space for a decision about whose belief is stupid and hence wrong and whose is smarter and right.It removes the relativity and the subjectivity of an issue that is supposed to be just an opinion and forces one of them to become a fact.And once that is done,to speak against that belief is heresay.
Requirements of politeness have never constrained thought, only behaviour, which given the salad bowl IQ of group thinking is not a bad thing at times.
On a one-on-one level such plain disrespect and jeering is just reflective of intolerance.Antagonize someone only for a cause worthy of confrontation.He wrote his book, he was handed a fatwa (bloody stupid of them I must say,best way of attracting attention to a book),left the country and promptly became an apologist.
So what is your view on satirists then? Voltaire, Swift and Hogarth openly mocked the beliefs of others.
Lol. Okay my view? I think people should be allowed to be as rude and blunt to each other as possible. But the only reason I don’t follow on that is because my view and belief should end where your nose begins (I know I’m quoting someone here I can’t remember who)
I’m only familiar with token writings of Voltaire, Swift and Hogarth so I can speak from a circumscribed position namely that their targets were cultural and tended to encompass slices of society that came under less sensitive labels than those of religion. Rushdie’s almost bullet pointed parody of Mohammad (unexcitingly written with a few flashes of brilliance) targeted a particular mode of faith in somebody and something, and was like saying that Christ was a drama queen. I find it disturbing that at this point you feel the need to intrude into another’s personal space and throw dung on the people they hold dear. To what end? Are you making them think about it in any way that is constructive? There is an academic criticism which I think should be the only critique allowed as far as religions are concerned and then there is dirty linen.
Islam is not above critique and should not be thought so, but low brow barbs such as comparing the Prophet’s wives to whores is not just an attack at an institution anymore. Poking fun is an art that Rushdie had not stylistically mastered in the Verses. I don’t subscribe to censorship in religion, I just subscribe to style.There is a difference between dealing with a national personality and a religious personality. That said, the reaction to his book was even more worthy of ridicule. A fatwa? Just because one person does not agree with your beliefs? Mohammad had to put up with a lot of shit in his lifetime what with women emptying their trash on him and kids pelting him with stones and he never ever sentenced anyone of them to either death or exile. Talk about straying from the faith. Anyway from what I remember a couple of countries censored the book not so much as a faith issue but by virtue of the fact that it violated their penal codes. Except for Iran, though I’m willing to bet a lot of that was just to draw attention away from the Iraq-Iran war.
Again personally I believe that while symptoms of faith are good dart boards, the kernels of faith should not, willy nilly be made targets of derision. Maan behen pay aa jana kaafi chawal harkat hai.
Note: when I spoke of censorship above I had meant to refer to writing, not religion in that one line.
King: If you are a Muslim reading the book the analogy is pretty straightforward and I do agree with you about the whole fatwa bit. Definitely a severely PMS-ing clerical decision. And yes most Muslim reaction to any slight perceived or real is reaching for concrete means rather than the pen whose acridity is hardly likely to move mountains. It’s a natural outcome when you feel your community is disempowered, when an already wounded target is speared it tends not react conservatively or perspicaciously. It does not make the reaction right but to dismiss the reaction as mere theatrics exacerbates the situation. I don’t think you’re Islmaophobic actually, you’re more Muslim-phobic in that you despise, like most people I know (both Muslims and non-Muslims), cultural religion. I’m more interested though in what I think is your belief that most Muslim actions stem from their religion rather than their politics. Do you feel that Muslim populations are on par with the most other actors on the world stage as far as directing politics go?
'tis abraham lincoln..your freedom ends where my nose begins. oft quoted in government and politics class by chubby, cheerful teacher fond of large, loud georgette key prints.
last comment acha tha. i'm all for freedom of expression but religion is very personal for most people, dukhti rugg peh haath khaamkwha main maarna isn't rebellious or daring, it's just silly and soon becomes pointless- rushdie's book is forgettable in the entire scenario, and what a pity, really, to be remembered for a fatwa instead of your art.
I always find it amusing that all these atheists are always dying to sling mud at religion and religious personalities; why do it in the first place? Like you said moizza it doesn't really achieve anything constructive. Why do atheists feel the need to show religion as wrong in order to portray themselves as the vanguards of all that is reasonable in this world. And there is considerable dogma as far as science and rationality are concerned. Certain lines of inquiry could lead to your being ridiculed in academic circles. Why isn't there any debate on "intelligent design"? Why is any alternative to the "theory of evolution" scoffed at by these worshippers of science and rationality? I believe this refusal to consider things that challenge the basic premise of their world view stems from the same sort of dogmatism that they find so repulsive in religiosity.
Minchka aap nay bilkul bajaa farmaya hai.
Ahmad: Jinx. I was recently speaking of that to someone about how the dogmatism of secularism is as strong as the dogma that they try to fight, sort of an extreme form of laicism. There is no credibility attached to claims of faith but it is unreservedly given to claims of science which rests of assumptions as intangible as those of faith at times. In the comment I made to The Penguin (lol, funny graphic image, I picture a little scholar penguin, waddling around with an Enid Blyton. Cutesies!!) this is precisely what I was referring to when I spoke of public ridiculing of an a belief i.e. its forces one hegemonic belief and everything including dissent after that has to be couched in that belief or risk being ignored. Even if you want to diagree with science, you are expected to be logical about the dissension.
King: Ahmad did not personalize the attack nor did he say at any point that it is okay to threaten someone with death if they write against you. I tried to make it very clear in my response that no matter what Rushdie wrote, the fatwa was an anal thing to give. And progress, logic etcetera is as big a load of crap as superstition fairy tales yaddi yaddi yah. That whole value of progress does not come about without building on a different form of suppression and myths and that should be most evident today. Just because a particular lifestyle is delivering today in some sections of the world does not make it a universal prescription.
* looks grumpy *
King, I think you’re fantastic but you’re beginning to sound hysterical again. If Muslims doing something so blatantly wrong gets your goat so you can just see their anger and helplessness reflected in daily editorials when they see their so-called “rights” being trampled upon by the self-proclaimed vanguards of the same. Media from the West (from what I can see of the few papers that I read) is plagued by an extreme ahistoricity as much as media here loves reveling in the bonds history places on them. Let’s not chill with the mob mentality shall we?
Moizza: Thanks for watchin my back there.
King: I really don't know what to say to you man,except that i am shocked at your sudden outburst. I don't want to start a lengthy debate on moizza's blog as that would not be nice. Besides, i have neither the patience nor an overwhelming sense of duty to explain myself to you.
wow!!ive missed quite a bit...dont think anything i say now can add to the debate...did discovery really do a thing about mistresses..haha thts fabulous...someone should do a thing for geo about pakistani men and their "keeps"hah
btw just one lil thing rushdie would not be where he is today if muslims hadnt reacted the way they did...damned shame that is..khair one must admit some of his writing are good..
Moizza: KOTH did not answer the questions raised by Ahmed except perhaps one. Can you explain defending worldview without answering questions raised against it?
Jarrar: Pakistani men are like good ads for mediocre products. It's a pity that I think of Urdu/Punjabi jokes necessary in a partner else I may expand my horizons. Though my mother's eternal fear is I'm going to marry some gora ferangi who is obviously only one step better than a kala ferangi!
Saquib: I realize that the debate on this particular topic has become reductionist as it is bound to happens about topics close to home. I'm going to let King respond to your comment if he wills.
errr.....I have nothing substantial to add here except 'Sam Harris for President'.
We have no need for him, we have in musharaf a local, homegrown sam harriss. Ok now moizza's blog will get blacklisted for sure:p
who the hell is sam harris??
@jarrar, Ever heard of Google?
Yeah well maybe i didn't king. But i also didn't call you an ignorant "bedouin" which is essentially what you branded me.
King and Ahmad: Take it outside guys, not on my turf. You can use your brains and wit here (hence amuse me, I will get a royal couch and throw money at boy who pleases me with his witticisms) but no brawn.
Sabizak and Jarrar: You are by repeating the infidel's name marking me on the political landscape. Do you not remember, our President has recently approved a body that will cater to "objectionable content" on blogs by blocking them. It will be done not only suo moto but also in case a concerned citizen feels some blog is affecting his/her sensitivity. So much power, let me count the ways in which I can abuse it...
Ahmed\'s comment had four whys and two other statements that were challenging atheistical worldview, I think. Perhaps i\'m still too young. Lol. But lets not spoil the woman\'s website.
to anonomous secret blog monitoring body..this blog is rocking...patriotic and has colors similar to national flag..lay off!!
yaar sabizak u actually made me google the guy..hehe
and read his blog too..unfortunatly his post is closed for comments..
sorry for flooding ure comment area but i have a personel experience with this issue.in my final term paper in my english class at college i for some reason decided to write on the existence of God...was a thirty page research/analysis thingy which was to be checked and graded by two of my peers...i was in my freshman year fresh from the land of the pure..now before i wrote this i was getting an A in this class...well one of my peers gave me a D and remarked that she still didnt believe in God..hehe suffice to say my grade slipped down to a B+...regardless of my arguments i still cant believe i was boneheaded enough to write a paper on God..hehe
Saqib: I am more interested in your sudden love for / than your persistent acolytle role.
Jarrar: I am surprised you didn't protest. What an ignorant thing on her part to do, religion (and I can't believe how numb headed people can be about this) is never about argument or appealing to the reason. It's a leap of faith. It's such crap honestly, if some bald self-help guru tells you to take leaps of faith, you'll gladly go the extra mile but refuse to see religion from the same paradigm. It all has to be about "but it's not proven/it can't happen blah blah". *rolls her eyes* Votev-quite the annoying this chwick seems and most unacademic also.From a comforting conforming position, yup, slip on your part Jerry my man.
King: A bedouin is an Arab-Celtic seahorse, mostly found in paved parking lots.It is irritated easily and reacts by cannoning predators with thongs and bread. Victims experince deaths by strangulation and decapitation respectively.
The hegemonic English world though has subverted the bedouins' sense of identity and despite all evidence claim that a bedouin is 1. an Arab of the desert, in Asia or Africa; nomadic Arab.
2. a nomad; wanderer or 3. of, pertaining to, or characteristic of the Bedouin.
The bedouins think the English speaking world is made up of funny looking opiates.
I am not in a morbid mood.
uhhh king i think she is pissed off man, look what you've done
Mizz Moizzza Zindhabaad! See, I am not an accolyte.
hi babes!!!
i can only be as smart as sam after that heavy duty discussion between all the reallllly well-read people...
hi babes!!!
:)
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